Topic: [2016-01-14] CTUK:Bitcoin & the 50 Year Vision for a Cashless Society (Read 213 times)

2015 was the first time in the United Kingdom that contactless transactions accounted for one in ten card payments according to the UK Cards Association. Stockholm, Sweden which was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661 is looking like the frontrunner in getting rid of them in 2016.

Non-cash payments’ share of total value of consumer payments in the Netherlands is 85% and in Africa they seem to have leapfrogged the traditional banking system with mobile payments like M-Pesa,  so what role will digital currencies play in the future of the global cashless society we are entering into?

When the retail banking system first introduced computers to their business model in the late 1950s few bankers and consultants foresaw how their recently adopted computers and telecommunications equipment would revolutionise the way consumers exchanged money.

By the early 1960s a John Diebold and his consulting company Diebold Group had developed several networked computer systems for commercial banks in response to costly and cumbersome paper checks which were growing at an astounding rate during this period.

Diebold wrote in business journals at the time of an impending "transaction overload," cautioning that "the 'cashless society' is no longer an option but a necessity."

It was this that led to the warning to banks from George Mitchell, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in 1966 of the increasing costs of processing paper checks and urging the banking industry to consider how "the computer can drastically change money and its use."

http://cointelegraph.uk/news/116052/bitcoin-the-50-year-vision-for-a-cashless-society